EDIT: SOLVED - compiled in 4.2.1 - due to gtk version <2.14 prior to 4.3 series Puppy it will lock up on the "plugins" menu and maybe others (due to missing gtkbuilder component?) - works great in 4.3 series though
Here is the new thread:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=52591

Abiword builds have been broken in Puppy since the 2.8.X series, specifically the presentation plugin and external browser usage.
My research on the external browser function (required for google, online dictionary, wikipedia, translation and other plugins) has brought me to a dead end. Here are my findings:

1. Abiword supposedly looks for a BROWSER environment variable
I added BROWSER="mozilla" and export BROWSER to /etc/profile and restarted - no effect (puppy uses mozstart, but it is not one of the accepted variables)
2. I ran "strace abiword 2>abistrace" and tried using the browser functions. Abiword was looking for "foo" in path... so I made a link from /usr/bin/mozilla to /usr/bin/foo. That did not work either.
3. I traced these calls in the source to getApp and openURL
all of this still yield "Warning operation not supported"
4. I recompiled with debugging enabled - did not yield any further info
5. I am now stuck unless I learn the abi-api to figure out why opening an external browser is no longer supported in Puppy since either 2.7.9 or 2.7.10

Ok, just out of curiosity I tracked the timeline of the failures back to about the time when I switched to woof built Puppy's for compiling. Although the smp support makes compiling much faster in 4.3.X, something somehow affects the compilation of abiword as it compiled fine with browser support in 4.2.1. Perhaps this is an abiword bug though ... it does check for gtk 2.14 and thus uses different code in 4.2.X, so maybe it is checking for 2.14+ when it really needs to be checking for 2.16+ (however installing 2.16 or 2.18 did not help - maybe I forgot to build with enable deprecated or something?)... Anyhow the end result is that I will go back to compiling abiword in 4.2 - I just wish it weren't so sloooow. Also upgrading libwv to a new release breaks support for images so that will remain unless someone can produce a new working build.

btw I also may have noted librsvg was missing its .pc file in the devx in 4.3.x (need to verify with a clean sfs) - good to know if you are compiling against it. (I have updated packages if anyone needs them)_________________Web Programming - Pet Packaging 100 & 101

Technosaurus,
Thanks for this. I have been using your abiword-2.8.1-i486.pet in Puppy431 as it does the best job of dealing with .docx files of any non-MS word processor I have tried. (Starting to get more of these from my coworkers who don't appreciate the joy of using Puppy on the job) This latest version works equally well.

I found that when I installed it in Puppy431 I had to create this symlink to get it running:

Code:

ln -s /usr/lib/libgoffice-0.6.so.6.0.3 /usr/lib/libgoffice-0.8.so.8

Would you mind posting your ./configure options? I'm trying to puzzle out compiling and would like to try duplicating your work here.

You may prefer to wait for my 4.2.x compile - all of the builtin plugins (including browser-based) work and there is no goffice dependency... I was in the process of rebuilding it with the other "non-build-in-able" plugins when I left the house this morning. The updated libwv that was statically compiled in may be the cause of the better docx in the 2.8.1, but .... there is always a but - it seems that newer libwv causes problems with images & I can't seem to figure out exactly why.

My first attempt at 2.8.2 with all possible builtin plugins using 4.2.X worked great but because of my overzealous optimizations it fails if you try to add any plugins later on (I view that as an unacceptable bug)... so it is recompiling now and will sacrifice about 100kb to be more functional

the compile options will come up on my development series builds if you google "technosaurus abiword site:murga-linux.com"
btw... there is a new builtin plugin called garble since then_________________Web Programming - Pet Packaging 100 & 101

I now have a working build from building in the 4.2 series - strangely though >tools>plugins caused a crash in 4.2.1 - works great in 4.3 though and now the browser plugins work too .... solution - PFM?

pass 2 (after running make and new2dir make install)
add --disable-shared and run make again
copy the abiword binary in /src to the /usr/bin and delete libabiword from /usr/lib

(beware of -fmerge-all-constants though I think it or combining it with -ffunction-sections, -fdata-sections and the ldflag --gc-sections may have broken loadable plugins)_________________Web Programming - Pet Packaging 100 & 101

tecnosaurus, I think we have finally solved this, with help from several Abiword developers. It seems that the problem was gnomevfs, but simply compiling without it didn't help. Anyway, here is the patch that I used as the basis of mods that have resulted in the Help working.